


Failures

by allfireburns



Category: Firefly
Genre: Angst, Gen, Introspection, Medical, POV Third Person, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:53:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allfireburns/pseuds/allfireburns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Simon knows he's a brilliant doctor, but he can't save everyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Failures

Simon knows he's a brilliant doctor. Everyone tells him that, had been telling him that since he graduated MedAcad and started working in the trauma wing on Osiris. And everyone was right. Brilliant, talented, gifted. Never had to _try_ to succeed, and he'd done things no twenty-four-year-old just out of school should have been able to. Reattached a girl's leg once. Brought people back from the edge of death, even a few, even a few who were clinically dead for over a minute. Those are the ones he tells people about, the ones he'll brag about.

There are others, though.

The three-year-old who'd fallen from a third-story window and broken his skull, started bleeding into his brain. He survived for two days while Simon stood by his bed, watching, like that would somehow help. That was the first patient he lost.

The woman who slit her wrists - two years older than him, a casual acquaintance from MedAcad, and she knew how to do it so she couldn't be saved.

The Alliance officer who'd been shot, and Simon had never seen that much blood before in his life, no matter how much they put back into him it wasn't fast enough, wasn't _enough_...

Thirty-four year old woman, stabbed in the stomach by her husband.

Forty-eight year old man, blood clot, misdiagnosed until it was too late.

Fifteen year old boy, burned over most of his body and turned septic.

And a seventeen year old girl he never should have been treating anyway, because his speciality was trauma, not neurology, and it wasn't some accidental neurons misfiring but intentional tampering that he had to deal with, and there was only so much he could do, so many combinations of drugs he could try and there was no one to go to for a consult. And of all his failures, she was the only one still alive, the only one who kept looking to him to save her, and he didn't have the heart to tell her he couldn't, didn't know how.


End file.
